The Umbrian Supper Club
Marlena de Blasi
Language: English
Pages: 198
ISBN: 2:00356130
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
'The only sauce is olive oil - green as sun-struck jade - splashed in small lustrous puddles, through which one skates the flesh, the fat, the bones, the potatoes, the bread. In the last, best drops, one skates a finger.'
Luscious and evocative, The Umbrian Supper Club recounts the stories of a small group of Umbrian women who - sometimes with their men and, as often, without them - gather in an old stone house in the hills above Orvieto to cook, to sit down to a beautiful supper, to drink their beloved local wines. And to talk.
During the gathering, the preparation, the cooking and the eating, they recount the memories and experiences of their gastronomic lives and, as much, of their more personal histories. For a period of four years, it was Marlena de Blasi's task, her pleasure, to cook for the Supper Club - to choose the elements for supper, to plan the menu and, with the help of one or another of the women in the club, to prepare the meal. What she learnt, what they cooked and ate and drank and how they talked is the fundamental stuff of this book.
Including a dozen recipes, drawn from the Supper Club, The Umbrian Supper Club is a delight to read and to taste.
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It with the dress, I thought, at last, that Cosima had the right clothes for an enchantress. She never wore any other shoes, though, than the too-large black men’s oxfords or, in winter, Pierangelo’s discarded hunting boots. Had she manoeuvred things in another way, Cosima might have had more – more clothes, more comforts. Once when I asked her, “Wouldn’t you like to have . . .” it was the only time I saw her veer toward anger. “Non hai capito niente. L’abbondanza é pericolosa. You’ve understood.
The Thursday night rules is: Once the supper begins, Miranda will not leave her chair at the table until the meal is finished. And so, with two kitchen towels against its heat, I lift the pan of pancetta and potatoes from the embers and take it round the table for everyone to serve themselves. Next, one of us fetches from the kitchen two large chipped Deruta platters piled with chicken crusted in wild herbs – rosemary, oregano, fennel seeds, fennel flowers and thyme – and roasted with crushed.
Try out the sound in my mind. For years she’s been simply Gilda. Not even a last name. I look at her now as she sits at the rustico work table in front of a four-kilo hill of fresh borlotti beans, her tiny white fingers flying over the pods, slitting them open with a thumbnail, turning out the red marbled beans into a large pot. Two of the dishes for tonight’s supper are being prepared by others, leaving little but the antipasto to Gilda and I. We’ll stew the beans with a faggot of rosemary and.
Hands small as mine.’ From Miranda, I think Gilda already knows something of my own shaping by the nuns. ‘I would learn much later that half the aunt’s pension opened the doors if not the hearts of the Sisters of Mercy to me. And – not to be outdone – the priests who came to say mass each morning in the convent opened the black bone buttons of their serge trousers to me as well. I punizioni. Punishments. As standard on the curriculum as vespers, the punishments were the inviolate and holy.
Few of my own ways and means upon them. The narrative has a dual thrust: in exuberant detail it recounts what we cooked and ate and drank and, in at least as exuberant detail, it tells the stories of the women’s lives: fidelity, aging, men and aging, sexuality, aging men and sexuality, aging women and sexuality, children, abandonment, destiny, death, the Mafia and Mother Church being among the subjects explored. ‘Vivi per sempre, live forever,’ we’d say, as we set to work on the preparations.